August 27: THE BEST OF FREDERIK POHL, Old Bridge (NJ) Public
Library, 7PM
September 10: BLADERUNNER (based on Philip K. Dick's DO ANDROIDS
DREAM OF ELECTRIC SHEEP?), Middletown (NJ) Public Library,
film at 5:30PM, discussion of film and book after film

Stephen Hunt of Science Fiction Crow's Nest says, "Earth's ocean
life is dying, Saturn's moons are next--act now to save our alien
fishy friends' lives before it's too late. Do you really want to
have an extraterrestrial dolphin's death on your line-caught fish-
cake munching tentacles? No, you don't!"

In fact, the situation may be worse than he realizes. I think
overfishing is an important issue, and it may already be too late.
I think it is very probably true that Enceladus fish populations
are down a whopping 30% from last (Terran) year at this time. I
suspect one in three surviving fish on Enceladus will be gone a
year from now. [-mrl]

There is a comic bit in the film MONTY PYTHON AND THE HOLY GRAIL in
which during plague time in history a man comes around to pick up
the dead. One such dead man is brought out to the cart over his
protests that he is not dead yet. What follows is an argument over
whether the man is dead or not with the man unsuccessfully taking
the negative position. It all seems very funny in the movie, but
at Harvard that scene was played out for real with ants.
E. O. Wilson convinced an ant colony that one of their members,
still very much alive, was dead. The ant was carried not once but
several times to the ant graveyard, all the while struggling and
trying to escape the self-appointed undertaker ant.

What was going on here? It all has to do with the question how do
ants know when one of their number is dead. Well, as we are told
in THEM!, ants do not see very well at all. We do not think about
it very much, but the first clues we have that a human has died are
frequently visual clues. Ants do not see well enough to know
whether another ant is just inactive or is actually dead. They can
be excused then for a behavior that in human society is much less
forgivable. They ignore corpses in their path. If an ant drops
dead the other ants just ignore her and walk around her. Ants make
very good teams at some activities, but they do not have the
perception or the attitude to worry much about a dead ant in their
midst.

After walking around a dead ant for about two days, suddenly it
becomes obvious that this is a dead ant. At that point some other
ant will realize that ant is dead and will pick her up and take her
to the ant cemetery where all the ants by mutual consent take their
dead. I wonder how the undertaker ant feels about coming here,
where she knows she will probably spend eternity, at least if all
goes well. And it is not much of a reward for loyal service. The
dead ant just no longer can help the colony and so is just thrown
on a pile of other dead ants. There is little place in an ant
colony for sentiment.

So what is it about two days that it takes that long for ants to
realize another ant is dead? Well, as you might suspect, it is the
fact that the ant has started to decompose. An ant that is
decomposing creates new chemicals that smell different from those
of a living ant. After two days of death an ant gives off a smell
of ant-death. Then another passing ant says, "Hey, this gal is not
just inactive, she has actually passed on to join the choir
invisible. This is a dead ant."

Wilson investigated for several weeks dealing with all sort of
repugnant odors until he found which one it was that signals to
other ants "don't call me for tea," or whatever the ant equivalent
is. He finally found that apparently it was oleic acid. That was
a major ingredient of margarine (at one time called "oleo").
People eat it as an emulsifier in foods, but to ants it signals
DEATH!

Wilson put a drop on an ant in an ant colony and immediately the
ant knew something was wrong and tried to clean it off. While she
was struggling to do that another ant came along and said, "Ah, a
dead ant. I have to take this one out to the graveyard." She
picked up the ant and headed out to the cemetery. The victim ant
struggled as if to say, "Hey, I am not dead yet. I just have this
stinky stuff on me." Well, the volunteer undertaker ant was not
convinced. This may have been a particularly lively corpse, but
you cannot fool an ant nose (or whatever it is that an ant smells
with). So, like a situation from PREMATURE BURIAL, the living ant
was taken to the graveyard. Undeterred she picked herself up and
returned to the colony. In human terms this would have been really
scary for observers, but ant observers take it pretty much in
stride. So the zombie ant returns to the colony and what do you
think happened? That's right. The next ant happened along and
said, "Oh, a dead ant, and the process repeated itself.

They say, "If fifty people tell you you're dead, lay down!!!" That
was what the other ants were trying to tell this ant. Well, the
zombie ant saw the fallacy in that line of reasoning right away.
In a triumph of Cartesian reasoning rarely seen in arthropoda, she
said to herself, "I wiggle, therefore I am."

After an hour or so of cleaning and unpleasant rides the one-time
zombie started getting friendly responses from the other ants.
That is she was completely ignored which presumably is the best
that a worker ant can hope for. The ant returned to her tasks with
a better view of the finiteness of all things ant.

Will Durant is best known for his eleven-volume "Story of
Civilization". THE GREATEST MINDS AND IDEAS OF ALL TIME (ISBN-13
978-0-743-23553-2, ISBN-10 0-743-23553-3) is a collection of his
essays from various sources. Unfortunately, many of the things
Durant says do not enhance his reputation as an historian. For
example, he says that reason allowed us to defeat the dinosaur. We
did not defeat the dinosaur, by reason or otherwise. While he
wrote before the discovery of the KT layer that led us to the
knowledge of the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs, he should have
known that they died off millions of years before reason arose. He
also extrapolates from the idea that general intelligence is
required for progress to the idea that genius is required for
progress, which is not necessarily true. (Durant definitely
subscribes to the "Great Man" theory of history.)

He also says things such as "[Bach] also had time to have twenty
children." This is hardly an accomplishment per se. Now if Mrs.
Bach had written all the music as well as having twenty
children.... (My point, in case it is not clear, is that merely to
father twenty children requires very little time.) He talks about
"the educated man" and "masculine poetry" as an ideal, and so on.
He rhapsodizes ancient Greece was a glorious civilization, but then
talks about how Rome was defeated by slavery without ever
explaining why slavery was okay in Greece.

When talking about the "Ten Greatest Achievements", he says that
measuring progress should be objective, not subjective, so we cannot
define it through happiness. Then he defines progress as
"increased control over the environment/external world." It is not
clear that this is any less subjective. (The achievements are
speech, fire, the conquest of animals [both domestication and the
ability to kill predators], agriculture, social organization,
morality, tools, science, education, and writing/printing.)

The audiobook version has a whole set of additional problems. The
reader mispronounces many words and names, including Flaubert,
Goethe, and As(h)oka. But even more, listening to an essay which
is primarily a list of "the hundred books necessary for a good
education" does not give one much chance to retain the information.
These turn out to be mostly texts and overviews--not "The Great
Books"--and one suspects many of them are either outdated,
unavailable, or both.

As I said, although the brief biographies et al are somewhat
informative, I do not think that this book enhances Durant's
reputation.

What is the name of the first identifiable European child born in
North America? What you probably learned in school was Virginia
Dare. These days they might acknowledge that there were plenty of
children with some European heritage born in Mexico before her.
But I don't think anyone learns that the first European child born
in North America was Snorri Karlsefnisson, sometime about 1011.
(In a sense, this is similar to how we are taught that the first
novel was Samuel Richardson's PAMELA (1740), or possibly even
Miguel de Cervantes's DON QUIXOTE (1605), with no mention of Lady
Murasaki's TALE OF GENJI (1020).)

But it is clear from the Icelandic sagas that this was the case.
It may not be clear where in North America Thorfinn Karlsefni
established his settlement, but it is clear from the descriptions
of the native inhabitants that it was North America. (Leif
Eiriksson explored it a few years earlier, but Thorfinn was the
first settler.)

The sagas are available from Penguin Books as THE VINLAND SAGAS
(ISBN-13 978-0-140-44776-7, ISBN-10 0-140-44776-8), translated by
Keneva Kunz, with an introduction by Gisli Sigurdsson. (The
Penguin edition I read was translated by Magnus Magnusson and
Hermann Palsson, with the introduction by them as well, so it was
almost an entirely different book!) Both editions include
"Graenlendinga Saga" and "Eirik's Saga", as well as a long
introduction on history, literature, etc., a glossary of proper
names, and several maps. I have not seen the new edition; one
suspects that there have been many discoveries affecting the belief
in the accuracy or translation of various parts.

For example, Chapter 5 of "Eirik's Saga" mentions Thjodhild's
Church, but the 1932 excavations of Eirik's farmstead at
Brattahlid/Kagssiarssuk found no such building. So people used
this as an example of the inaccuracy/unreliability of the saga.
Then in 1961 a workman digging in Kagssiarssuk found remains and
when that area was excavated, a very small medieval church was
found which is now believed to be Thjodhild's Church.

There is definitely some humor in the sagas: "They stayed there
[Straumfjord] that winter, which turned out to be a very severe
one; they had made no provision for it during the summer, and now
they ran short of food and the hunting failed. They moved out to
the island in the hope of finding game, or stranded whales, but
there was little food to be found there, although their livestock
throve. Then they prayed to God to send them something to eat, but
the response was not as prompt as they would have liked." ["Eirik's
Saga", Chapter 8] Perhaps the best-known, though, is "[Eirik]
named the country he had discovered Greenland, for he said that
people would be much more tempted to go there if it had an
attractive name." ["Graenlendinga Saga", Chapter 1]

And why was I reading these? Because we were visiting L'Anse aux
Meadows, the site on the Great Northern Peninsula of Newfoundland
where they had discovered a Viking site dating from around 1000.
Actually, "Viking" is probably an inaccurate term. "Viking" was a
verb, not a noun. More accurately, it was a Norse, Icelandic, or
Greenlander settlement, depending on how you parse the geopolitics
of the era. [-ecl]

[The first European child born in the New World was most likely a
Clovis and would likely have been born 9500 BCE or thereabouts.
Clovis probably came from the areas we now call France or Spain.
The oldest human fossils found in the Americas are probably of
European origin.

Durant says it was "we" who defeated the dinosaurs. But he does
not say what that includes. It is possible that "we" did defeat
the dinosaurs where "we" refers to me and a certain asteroid.
-mrl]

Mark Leeper
mleeper@optonline.net
Quote of the Week:
The meaning of life is whatever you want it to be.
--Nic Chappell